We readily inquire, ‘Does he know Greek or Latin?’ ‘Can he write poetry and prose?’ But what matters most is what we put last: ‘Has he become better and wiser?’ We ought to find out not who understands
most
but who understands
best
. We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty.
He had never been good at sport: ‘At dancing, tennis and wrestling I have not been able to acquire more than a slight, vulgar skill; and at swimming, fencing, vaulting and jumping, no skill at all.’ Nevertheless, so strong was Montaigne’s objection to the lack of wisdom imparted by most schoolteachers, that he did not shrink from suggesting a drastic alternative to the classroom for the youth of France.
If our souls do not move with a better motion and if we do not have a healthier judgement, then I would just as soon that a pupil spend his time playing tennis. (Ill. 18.1)
He would of course have preferred students to go to school, but schools that taught them wisdom rather than the etymology of the word and could correct the long-standing intellectual bias towards abstract questions. Thales from Miletus in Asia Minor was an early example of the bias, celebrated throughout the ages for having in the sixth century BC tried to measure the heavens and for having determined the height of the Great Pyramid of Egypt according to the theorem of similar triangles – a complicated and dazzling achievement, no doubt, but not what Montaigne wished to see dominate his curriculum. He had greater sympathy with the implicit educational philosophy of one of Thales’s impudent young acquaintances:
I have always felt grateful to that girl from Miletus who, seeing the local philosopher … with his eyes staring upwards, constantly occupied in contemplating the vault of heaven, tripped him up, to warn him that there was time enough to occupy his thoughts with things above the clouds when he had accounted for everything lying before his feet … You can make exactly the same reproach as that woman made against Thales against anyone concerned with philosophy: he fails to see what lies before his feet.
Montaigne noted in other areas a similar tendency to privilege extraordinary activities over humbler but no less important ones – and just like the girl from Miletus, tried to bring us back to earth:
Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor being false to yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult. Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and as tense as those of other lives.
So what would Montaigne have wished pupils to learn at school? What kind of examinations could have tested for the wise intelligence he had in mind, one so far removed from the mental skills of the unhappy Aristotle and Varro?
The examinations would have raised questions about the challenges of quotidian life: love, sex, illness, death, children, money and ambition.
An examination in Montaignean wisdom
1. About seven or eight years ago, some two leagues from here, there was a villager, who is still alive; his brain had long been battered by his wife’s jealousy; one day he came home from work to be welcomed by her usual nagging; it made him so mad that, taking the sickle he still had in his hand he suddenly lopped off the members which put her into such a fever and chucked them in her face. (
Essays
, II.29)
a) How should one settle domestic disputes?
b) Was the wife nagging or expressing affection?
2. Consider these two quotations:
I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening. (
Essays
, I.20)
I can scarcely tell my cabbages from my lettuces. (
Essays
, II.17)
What is a wise approach to death?
3. It is perhaps a more chaste and fruitful practice to bring women to learn early what the living reality [of penis size] is rather than to allow them to make conjectures according to the licence of a heated imagination: instead of our organs as they are, their hopes and desires lead them to substitute extravagant ones three times as big … What great harm is done by those graffiti of enormous genitals which boys scatter over the corridors and staircases of our royal palaces! From them arises a cruel misunderstanding of our natural capacities. (
Essays
, III.5)
How should a man with a small ‘living reality’ bring up the subject?
4. I know of a squire who had entertained a goodly company in his hall and then, four or five days later, boasted as a joke (for there was no truth in it) that he had made them eat cat pie; one of the young ladies in the party was struck with such a horror at this that she collapsed with a serious stomach disorder and a fever: it was impossible to save her. (
Essays
, I.21)
Analyse the distribution of moral responsibility.
5. If only talking to oneself did not look mad, no day would go by without my being heard growling to myself, against myself, ‘You silly shit!’ (
Essays
, I.38)
The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being. (
Essays
, III.13)
How much love should one have for oneself?
Setting people examination papers measuring wisdom rather than learning would probably result in an immediate realignment of the hierarchy of intelligence – and a surprising new élite. Montaigne delighted in the prospect of the incongruous people who would now be recognized as cleverer than the lauded but often unworthy traditional candidates.
I have seen in my time hundreds of craftsmen and ploughmen wiser and happier than university rectors. (Ill. 18.2)
What clever people should sound and look like
It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it. Profound ideas cannot, after all, be explained in the language of children. Yet the association between difficulty and profundity might less generously be described as a manifestation in the literary sphere of a perversity familiar from emotional life, where people who are mysterious and elusive can inspire a respect in modest minds that reliable and clear ones do not.
Montaigne had no qualms bluntly admitting his problem with mysterious books. ‘I cannot have lengthy commerce with [them],’ he wrote, ‘I only like pleasurable, easy [ones] which tickle my interest.’
I am not prepared to bash my brains for anything, not even for learning’s sake, however precious it may be. From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime … If I come across difficult passages in my reading I never bite my nails over them: after making a charge or two I let them be … If one book wearies me I take up another.
Which was nonsense, or rather playful posturing on the part of a man with a thousand volumes on his shelf and an encyclopedic knowledge of Greek and Latin philosophy. If Montaigne enjoyed presenting himself as a dim gentleman prone to somnolence during philosophical expositions, it was disingenuousness with a purpose. The repeated declarations of laziness and slowness were tactical ways to undermine a corrupt understanding of intelligence and good writing.
There are, so Montaigne implied, no legitimate reasons why books in the humanities should be difficult or boring; wisdom does not require a specialized vocabulary or syntax, nor does an audience benefit from being wearied. Carefully used, boredom can be a valuable indicator of the merit of books. Though it can never be a sufficient judge (and in its more degenerate forms, slips into wilful indifference and impatience), taking our levels of boredom into account can temper an otherwise excessive tolerance for balderdash. Those who do not listen to their boredom when reading, like those who pay no attention to pain, may be increasing their suffering unnecessarily. Whatever the dangers of being wrongly bored, there are as many pitfalls in never allowing ourselves to lose patience with our reading matter.